A growing number of services provide large collections of music over the Internet. As more and more artists create music, the sizes of these collections continue to grow. Users of these musical services frequently discover artists and genres that they were previously unaware of. In these cases, it may be difficult and time consuming to gauge whether a particular artist or genre is preferable to the user, which may influence the user's decisions, e.g., to purchase the artist's music.
For instance, some artists have extensive collections of musical works that span large periods of time and a variety of musical styles. When such an artist is newly discovered by a user of the music service, the volume and diversity of the artist's work makes it difficult to quickly and efficiently assess the artist. Generally, the user must select and listen to a large number of songs to determine whether the user is interested in the particular artist. Thus, a need exists for a system and method for automatically and intelligently generating an audio summary from a group or collection of songs, or other audio files.